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Sleeping Coins

A few weeks ago, Michele Urton, assistant curator of contemporary art, sent an email to staff members asking for their contributions of sleeping coins. We at Unframed were intrigued.

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What are sleeping coins? For artist Haegue Yang, they’re forgotten change, sitting in drawers, gathering dust. (In Korean, Yang actually calls them “dust coins.”) Michele was collecting them for Yang’s Storage Piece (2004), an installation composed of crated and wrapped works by the artist, which is in the Your Bright Future exhibition.

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Storage Piece is on loan and the museum is obligated to return the installation to its owner in the condition it was received. To that end, in collaboration with the artist, we opted to collect our own coins for the work so as to ensure that the originals aren’t dismantled.

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It’s one way the staff was able to be part of the experience, but the public can engage with Storage Piece too. Another component of the installation is knitting—Yang started a project pictured below which our visitors are welcome to add to.